“... the English reader with an astonishing recovery of the intricate fabric of allusions, from Dante and Petrarch, through Leopardi and Foscolo to Carducci and D’Annunzio. Perhaps inevitably some allusions are passed over in favour of more recondite ones. I think, for example, that the first lines of one of Dante’s ...”

“... In Italy you can buy poetry T-shirts featuring lines by Dante, Leopardi and others. The Ungaretti shirt is good value: it gives you a whole work, though not a very long one. ‘Mattina’ (‘Morning’) reads in its entirety as follows: M’illumino d’immenso In books, those words are tethered to a particular location, Santa Maria la Longa, 26 January 1917; but there is a rightness about their transplantation to innumerable present-day torsos ...”

“... tradition, which trains adherents to read stories and images as parables or allegories, or of Dante’s suggestion that we read The Divine Comedy on four different levels: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical (spiritual). Emulating Dante, Campo creates a world oversaturated with meaning. There is something ...”

“... Christina Rossetti herself said that her poem was not to be taken as an allegory. Her brother, Dante Gabriel, whose illustration shows the two sisters sleeping in each other’s arms, was fascinated by the intensity of feeling between them. Children are disturbed by the sexual jostling of the goblins and by the sinfulness of the delicious. Henry ...”

“... to crack wise.’ He insists on being burly, reassuringly low-faluting: ‘everybody’s favourite Dante pin-ups’, or ‘It is hard to see why V. Nazarenko should have got his highly orthodox knickers in such a twist.’ He tilts at dons, with all the rounded audacity that names no names: ‘coldly able young academics who behave as if the arts, like their ...”

“... what Bahrām-Gušnasp would have made of the image.Lilith also fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, she is an auburn-haired beauty admiring her image in a mirror, surrounded by roses and poppies. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the painting, where she is the ‘witch he [Adam] loved before the gift of ...”

“... to the great poets of the past. In his central book, Varianti e altra linguistica, the essays on Dante and Petrarch – essays which for their combination of learning and penetration excel even those of his master, Ernst Robert Curtius – there is nothing said which he was not equally ready to say, mutatis mutandis, about Montale. He studied the poetry of ...”

“... his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts that range from Dante’s Divine Comedy to an anonymous scribe’s record of the Acts and Resolutions of the 29th General Assembly of Iowa (1902). The lines of Eliot’s that most often occurred to me as I worked my way through these thousand or so pages of commentary (set in ...”

“... clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we have to a national epic. Just as the Declaration of Independence ... contains in embryo our whole future history as a nation, so the language of Huckleberry Finn (another Declaration of ...”

“... Vasari must have repressed the urge to censor this giant who was, as Rubin points out, compared to Dante by his contemporaries. Florentines were painfully conscious that Dante died in exile and was buried far away in Ravenna. Michelangelo could never in his old age be lured back to Medici Florence, but Cosimo wasted no time ...”

“... One of the most active of Montale’s previous translators was under the impression that Dante employed the word libello to mean ‘libel’ instead of ‘little book’. A dedicated and knowledgeable student of the tradition from which he emerged, Montale was a stickler for detail, so Mr Galassi’s wide competence comes as a particular ...”

“... criminality is to be found in them. The fullest reference is in Cristoforo Landino’s edition of Dante, published in 1481. In his discursive introduction to this, Landino has a long passage about the excellence of Florentine artists, in which Castagno is eloquently praised as a ‘lover of the difficulties of art’, and a painter of great vividness and ...”

“... were entirely with the Italians: he had studied in Rome in 1925, fancied himself a connoisseur of Dante and of Italian civilisation and, by his own admission, paid no attention to the rise of Fascism. Many Times readers rightly detected Fascist sympathies in his copy. In his book about the conflict, Eyewitness in Abyssinia (1937), Matthews directed scorn at ...”

“... and seemingly intractable predicament invites a range of responses and role models. From Dante onwards Italy had been described as plagued by factionalism and inertia, dwarfed by the glories of ancient Rome, hampered by a powerful church whose interests were universal rather than national, and thus laid open to every foreign predator. ‘The most ...”

“... study Florence, partly, perhaps, because the Florentines were always changing their constitution (Dante compared the city to an invalid in bed, always changing her position and always uncomfortable), and partly because the sources are richer. In Florence, there was an official record of who said what in important debates; in Venice, there was not. Very ...”